The owner of a Web hosting company who claimed to have erased his entire business from the Internet with a single script command appears to have made the whole thing up.

Marco Marsala of Italy posted a cry for help on the popular Server Fault forum earlier this week, claiming he’d accidentally erased all the data on his servers including backups.

“I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1,535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers,” Marsala wrote. “Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.